Strategy Coach
Work out what the strategy means for your job, and plan the next 90 days around it. Private to you, whatever your role and whatever your grade.
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Work out what the strategy means for your job, and plan the next 90 days around it. Private to you, whatever your role and whatever your grade.
BBC News employs around 8,500 people, and almost none of them read a strategy document and immediately know what to do differently on Monday. This is where you work that out: what is changing, what it means for the work you personally do, and what you are going to do about it in the next 90 days.
Three rooms, best used in this order. You can go straight to any of them, but the planner works far better once you have talked the strategy through first.
Talk through what the strategy actually means for the work you do. Argue with it if you want to.
Ten minutes to turn it into two or three real priorities, with what you will stop to make room.
Practise the conversation that makes the plan happen, before you have it for real.
The honest version. Bring your job, whatever it is, and work out where it sits in what BBC News is trying to do. Push back if you think a pillar is nonsense. The coach will engage with the argument rather than defend the organisation, and it will tell you plainly when something has a cost for you rather than dressing it up.
About ten minutes, and you leave with a written plan. A year is too long to plan and a week is too short to change anything, so this works in 90 day cycles. The coach leads, pushes you from vague to specific, and makes you say what you are going to stop doing to make room.
Two quick questions, then the session starts. It takes about ten minutes and you can stop at any point and still send yourself the plan.
Most plans die in a conversation that did not go well. Making the case for something, pushing back on a decision, asking for budget, telling a team something they will not like. Describe who you need to talk to and the coach becomes them, properly, including the awkward bits. Pause whenever you want and it will step out and tell you how you did.
Tell the coach who to play and what the conversation is about. The more real detail you give, the more useful the rehearsal.
Not everything is about strategy. A colleague you cannot get through to, a workload that has stopped being sustainable, a decision you keep putting off, a team that has gone quiet, a career question you have not said out loud. This is the general coach, built on the World Class Manager method, used by more than 250,000 people. You do not have to be a manager to use it.
The coach is currently working from publicly available BBC strategy material rather than the internal BBC News strategy and operational plan, which is due shortly. It is a fair account of the direction of travel, but it does not contain internal targets, divisional plans or figures, and it will not guess at them. When the internal document lands it replaces this, and the coach will be working from the real thing.